Witness To The Mob

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All Rise...

This miniseries made Judge Victor Valdivia an offer he could and did refuse.

The Charge

The story of the man who brought down John Gotti.

Opening Statement

As told in a manner that will bring down viewers unfortunate enough to sit
through this snoozefest.

Facts of the Case

In the mid-1970s, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano (Nicholas Turturro,
NYPD Blue) is a rising Mafia star in New York City, especially when
teamed with his longtime friend Louie Milito (Michael Imperioli, The
Sopranos). He catches the eye of another rising Mafia star, John Gotti (Tom
Sizemore, Natural Born Killers), and
together the two plot to take over the Gambino crime family from their
ineffectual boss Paul Castellano (Abe Vigoda, Fish). However, their
violent rise to power eventually leads to their undoing.

The Evidence

You'd think that with an impressive cast and Robert De Niro (GoodFellas) serving as
executive producer, this two-part miniseries (which originally aired on NBC in
1998) would be a real gritty, no-holds-barred insider account of what life in
the Mafia is really like. You would be wrong. Witness to the Mob is pure
TV-movie mediocrity, as generic as any Lifetime movie starring Tori Spelling.
The dialogue is mostly rehashed from other mob films, the direction is lifeless,
and the storytelling is so plodding that it bleeds whatever excitement there
is.

It's inconceivable that this miniseries should be so tedious, given the
source material. The story of John Gotti's and Sammy Gravano's criminal careers
has been well-chronicled in many places. In many ways, they've become the most
famous Mafia leaders of the modern era, even though they were arguably much less
significant than their predecessors. Unlike true gangster visionaries like Lucky
Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Carlo Gambino, Gravano and Gotti were basically
street punks who got lucky. Even so, there's still plenty of excitement in their
story, but you wouldn't know it by this miniseries. Everything is related in the
most leaden and episodic manner possible: something mildly interesting happens,
and then something else happens immediately afterwards. It's supposedly tied
together with Turturro's narration, but the lines he's given are so frequently
either vague or clichéd that they add nothing of value.

The dreary writing and directing aren't the only problems. Even though the
cast is generally solid, that doesn't mean they belong here. Abe Vigoda, in
particular, sticks out like a sore thumb. Paul Castellano, for all his failings,
is still meant to be a fearsome and imposing figure (the real Castellano stood
over six feet tall and weighed well over two hundred pounds). Abe Vigoda is many
things; imposing and fearsome are not among them. Even though Castellano is
meant to come off as a mob boss who's less respected than he should be, that
doesn't mean that he should come off as a sad sack. For his part, Turturro does
what he can, but his voice and accent sound uncomfortably close to Jim Breuer's
Saturday Night Live impression of Joe Pesci. The rest of the cast,
including such mob movie stalwarts as Imperioli, Frank Vincent, Vincent Pastore,
and Debi Mazar (as Gravano's wife Debra), all give serviceable but unexceptional
performances. In all fairness, this miniseries was made a year or two before
The Sopranos premiered on HBO, so at the time it wasn't nearly as
passé to see some of these actors in a mob movie as it is now. Still, on
The Sopranos, most of them played actual three-dimensional characters and
gave better performances. Here they're basically playing thinly defined plot
devices and their performances are all the weaker for it.

It doesn't help that this miniseries, for all its grittiness, is still
forced to conform to network TV standards. Yes, there's more violence and harsh
language here than on most NBC shows of the era. Presumably, more people in this
miniseries get shot in the head than on your average episode of Will &
Grace. Still, this may be going out on a limb, but it's highly unlikely the
real John Gotti ever said of a mortal enemy, "Screw him!" Or that
Gravano ever exclaimed, "We're really in the soup now!" An earlier HBO
movie that told this story, Gotti (1996), had its share of problems, but
at least the dialogue and situations in that project actually felt more
realistic and natural.

Technically, the DVD isn't much better. The full-screen transfer looks dark
and murky, although that could just be the source material. The miniseries was
apparently shot in the dead of winter, judging by the lack of color or sunlight.
The Dolby Digital stereo mix is adequate, though hardly booming. There are no
extras, not even to correct some of the peculiar inaccuracies in the script.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

The one performance in Witness to the Mob that doesn't feel phoned-in
or contrived is Sizemore's. John Gotti is clearly the part he was born to play:
a loudmouth bully who's all bluster and violence with little self-awareness. In
HBO's Gotti, Armand Assante (Judge Dredd) seemed to strain to make
Gotti an empathetic protagonist. Here, since Gotti is just a supporting
character, Sizemore is free to depict him as vulgar and vicious as possible
without worrying about whether the audience will like him or not. It's probably
the closest to the real Gotti that any actor has ever gotten.

Closing Statement

Sizemore's performance and the occasional (very occasional) snippet of clever
dialogue aren't enough to make Witness to the Mob worth recommending.
Even hardcore Mafia movie buffs will find this miniseries dull and hackneyed.
Anyone curious about the story of John Gotti and Sammy Gravano would do better
to read any of the seven (seven!) books written about their rise and fall.